Aditya Jain joins the lab for a summer undergraduate research fellowship! Aditya just completed high school at Westview High School in Portland, Oregon. During high school Aditya began his research career in earnest studying important aspects of lung cancer and immunotherapy. His work on small cell lung cancer with Dr. Tim Mitin at OHSU was published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology and the Lung Cancer Journal. Aditya will begin his freshman year at Boston University this September as a Trustee Scholar. His long-term goal is to become a physician-scientist after completing a MD-PhD program. Welcome to the lab!

Work from the group of Dr. Jennifer Tseng (then at BIDMC and now the new chief of surgery at Boston Medical Center) shows that stereotactic body radiotherapy could be a promising treatment option for patients with unresected pancreatic cancer. This study was published in the journal Cancer. Dr. Mancias is glad to be part of this work and support further research into new therapies for pancreatic cancer as part of the Pancreas and Biliary Tumor Center at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center. To the left: survival curve of various treatment options for patients with unresected pancreatic cancer. Below: example stereotactic body radiation therapy treatment plan. Read more about the study here.

Our work titled 'Compensatory metabolic networks in pancreatic cancers upon pertubation of glutamine metabolism' is published today in Nature Communications.

As pancreatic cancers rely on glutamine metabolism, here we tested a new glutaminase inhibitor for efficacy in pancreatic cancer. Despite dramatic early effects on proliferation in cell culture, pancreatic cancers have adaptive metabolic networks that sustain proliferation in vitro and in vivo. We use a combination of quantitative proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics to understand this adaptive/resistance response and thereby design effective combinatorial treatments to overcome resistance to glutaminase inhibition.

This work began during Joe's post-doctoral fellowship in the labs of Alec Kimmelman and Wade Harper and was completed during the first few months of the Mancias Lab opening.

Congrats to Douglas Biancur on his first, first author publication! Doug was a research technician in Alec Kimmelman's lab and then jointly in the Mancias and Kimmelman labs. He has since moved on to graduate school at NYU.

And thanks to all of our collaborators including Joao Paulo and Steve Gygi, Gerald Chu, and Beata Malachowska and Wojciech Fendler!